
We all feel that the whole world is spinning faster and faster, not only in terms of technology but also in the way we do business. Here are some bits of predictions on what is likely going to happen in the next few months, brought to you by our CEO, CTO, and CRO.
I am somewhere in between a humanist and a scientific mind. Although I am a philosopher by education, my experience includes management, communication and broadly understood technological issues.
If we look at hiring rates and an interest for new developers in Poland and around the world, we can see a gap - depending on who estimates - of 50 thousand up to even 300 thousand programmers in market demand. So we face an industry need on the one hand and a lack of new programmers on the other. Something has to be done, and in the long run a constant race between businesses for new employees that are being taken out from competing companies is not benefiting anyone.
It leads to high uncertainty in project management, a bigger risk of client churn, and is not good for the IT industry in the long run.
What we can do, aside from looking at closer cooperation with universities and schools, is to start to teach and to create a space for new developers' promotion inside the companies. It is costly and demands a long-term strategy, but this is a price we need to pay to be able to develop and grow our businesses.
Last year, markets were flooded with a huge amount of money and tech businesses got used to ever-larger budgets for digitization (e.g. for IT services and product building). This year we can already see the first signs of the crisis and it surely will make investors less willing to spend money and is going to drive them to make more informed decisions. If we put it together with - sometimes missed - expectations of IT service providers, it may lead to problems for some organizations that are not prepared for shifting from last year’s boom into an upcoming downfall.
If a large-scale military conflict in Ukraine (and Belarus) begins, it is possible that companies running IT projects in this region will turn their eyes to other markets, including Poland. If we consider all three topics mentioned, the situation in 2022 can be both a threat or more likely a chance for the Polish tech industry. Of course, a lot depends on whether the money will be spent wisely, and if tech companies are ready to create an environment in which there will be a space for the education of more specialists.
For me, being a CTO means trusting and delegating technology decision-making to the teams.
The year 2022 will be a time where remote work of engineers will not be an exception, but a new standard in our industry. What is already routine for members of technical teams, will continue to be a challenge for project managers. Transformation of processes and methods of communication is inevitable, and the market advantage will be achieved by companies that will adapt faster to the new reality and be able to deliver business value to their customers with the same efficiency and the same high quality as before changes.
The digital transformation is speeding up, not from year to year, but monthly. Increasing market expectations put pressure on technical teams to deliver solutions at a faster pace. The approach in which the programmer assigns as much responsibility as possible to external services and focuses his work on architecture and business logic fits perfectly into this trend. Headless CMS, headless e-commerce, (Amazon / Google / Azure) Cloud in projects is no longer a surprise. We buy more and more services such as data, identity, and operations in the PaaS model, and we focus on the value unique to the client's needs and ideas. Projects can be validated on the market much faster, and we can witness more specialization in developers' work.
Any forward-thinking and responsible organization must start investing its time and resources in knowledge transfer. The demand for software engineers in the market is very high, the expectations of professionalism are as high as never before. Nothing happens in a vacuum, if we want to give more responsibility for the tech industry to qualified people, we have to start preparing them now. Market demand lowers standards. If we do not want to let that happen as an industry, this is the time to act. Moreover, the days when a programmer was responsible for code and only code ended a few years ago. Currently, a mature engineer is required to have a whole range of soft skills, and it is also worth taking care of strengthening these qualities in your teams.
I build stable, long-term software development teams in Poland for clients worldwide.
For the next few years, we will witness an increase in the flexibility of experienced engineers in the domain of shifting between technologies. It is true that we live in a world of specialization, but the pace of development of new technologies is so fast that moving from PHP to Node.js should be a new must-have skill-set for every experienced developer.
Of course, specialization has its advantages, but if you are a mature developer, your background and knowledge is more important, and you should be able to become a senior in new technology within months if you put in enough effort.
In companies and projects, this kind of skill-set is going to be in bigger demand, so don't be afraid to do that, especially when it is not necessary to always fit in 100%. If you are experienced and flexible, you can start the journey now, and get better with time passing.
It used to take months to finish an initial part of a deal on software development, and today - in many cases - it takes only a few days. In the blink of an eye, your potential development team can sail to another project - that is how much good coding skills are in demand on the market. And companies (clients) started to realize that.
The entire industry is going through a "startupization" phase, and it is very important to have a partner who combines business and tech maturity with the speed and flexibility of a startup. In the past, if you got something immediately, it wasn't of good quality.
Now you have to be precise and fast. Luckily the whole tech industry got more mature and experienced, so it is easier to find a good fit for new challenging projects.